Black and grey flash drawing of two swallows in flight above a moth with spotted wings, on a pale background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows and a moth flash sheet

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two swallows in flight, one facing left and one facing right, above a moth with outspread wings and feathered antennae. The linework is fine and dark, with hatched shading on the wings and bodies and dotted markings on the moth. The image is black and grey on a plain off-white background, with the three motifs arranged as a simple composition.

Traditional Swallow Bird Moth Butterfly Flash sheet

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came in over the Ness on the third day of the herring run, two of them, low and quick, and the men on the Gannet said that meant the sea would give back what it had taken. Old Morag Reid, who mended nets in the loft above the ice store, said swallows only ever went where there was warmth and somebody had left a door open. She sent her grandson down to the quay with a lantern and told him to watch the lamp at the pier end.

Keep reading

Davie sat on the bollard until the boats were past the breakwater. Something small and grey came in off the water and circled the lantern, a moth with wings the colour of wet slate and dark rings on them like eyes. It knocked against the glass and fell, so he cupped it in his hands and carried it up the brae to the loft, where his grandmother was threading cork onto a line.

'It came to the light,' he said. 'Same as the swallows came to the chimney.' She looked at the moth for a long time, then took a pin from her collar and fixed it to the beam above the window, wings open, so the fleet could see it from the water if they looked up the hill. 'They fly by what they can see,' she said. 'Moths and men both.'

The boats came in on the morning tide, all eleven, the Gannet last with her sail torn. Davie ran up the brae to tell her, and found the beam bare, the pin lying on the floorboards, and the window open to a sky full of swallows turning over the harbour. She did not ask where the moth had gone. She put the kettle on and said the nets would keep until the men had eaten.